Hey everyone, and welcome back to Wrong Every Time. It’s been a very Dungeons & Dragons-themed week at my house, as I continued to munch through episodes of Vox Machina, while my own campaign group convened for our first spring session. The confluence of these events had me in a focused game-design mode during our live session, as I sifted through the various motivations of our individual party members. D&D can be many things to many people, and it certainly is a variety of things for our group: one of our party members most delights in crunching their character’s numbers, while another mostly wants to express their character’s outrageous personality, while a third is largely concerned with our adventure’s fantasy worldbuilding. It’s not just “difficult” to balance these desires – it is, to some extent, impossible to satiate all of them without stepping on some toes. And that precise impossibility of “perfect form” is what makes the whole affair so interesting to me, as more a continuing thought exercise than a solvable equation.
Oh, and we also watched some movies this week! I’ve actually got quite the diverse selection for you all, so let’s not waste another moment, and charge on into the Week in Review!
Our first feature of the week was an acclaimed and crushing personal drama, Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland. Based on a nonfiction accounting of American drifters in the twenty-first century, Nomadland stars Frances McDormand as Fern, a widow and former factory worker who’s been left to spin along the breeze. When her husband died, Fern stayed in the town he’d loved. When the factory closes and that town dies, she is left with nowhere to go, drifting from seasonal gig to seasonal gig while living out of her van.
Nomadland feels like two equally compelling films, segueing from documentary to personal drama as it progresses. In the first act, we are treated to a confessional-rich portrait of America’s abandoned workers, people who’ve given all their best years to a system that had no intention of supporting them. The flippant, resigned manner in which these people reflect on their exploitation cuts sharper than any tears, while the charity of the community they’ve found only underscores the inhumanity of their cattle-like treatment. Nomadland doesn’t need to seethe with righteous fury; by simply capturing these eminently decent people and the conditions a life of service has provided them, it invites the audience to light their own torches.
Nomadland’s second half is far less politically incendiary, as it dives into the larger non-economic reasons Fern herself choses to live as a drifter. This could be seen as a thematic letdown, but to be honest, it feels like the only coherent dramatic solution for a film whose “antagonists” are implacable realities of industrial capitalism. And fortunately, this particular personal story revolves around Frances McDormand, who is quite possibly the greatest living actor in the world.
McDormand’s richness and subtlety of expression are dazzling in her every role, and the complexity of Fern allows her to achieve even greater heights of emotive expression. She’s one of those rare performers who, like DeNiro or Kang-ho, seem to simply possess a greater degree of nuanced facial control than the vast majority of actors. She can manipulate the creases in her face to portray a whirlwind of emotions while barely moving her mouth or eyes; in one slight tightening of a cheek, she can express that entire “not so sure about your police work there” joke from Fargo without a word, her bemusement and fatigue clear in the smallest of muscle movements.
With McDormand’s performance to guide us, we come to know Fran at least as well as she knows herself: dignified but with a strong silly streak, perpetually open to new experiences, fierce in her support for her friends, yet ultimately driven by an irrepressible wanderlust. Fran ignores a number of off-ramps from her lonely journey, but it is not her lifestyle’s tenuity that ails her; it is the specter of her husband and lost town, the only places she could call home. Capital builds lives for its useful workers, but is happy to decommission those lives when the well runs dry. Through Fran’s journey, we see the lonely spaces where life once dwelled on both a personal and societal level, like a eulogy for the American dream.
A film that heavy basically demanded a light follow-up, so we jumped straight to Warriors Two, a truly outstanding martial arts showcase. Sammo Hung (one of Jackie Chan’s most reliable Hong Kong collaborators) directs, writes, and stars in this delightful escapade, taking the role of the lead student of a master Wing Chun specialist. When a local bank cashier overhears a plot to kill the mayor, he is hounded relentlessly by nefarious goons, until his mother is actually killed in his place. The cashier is taken in as a student by Hung’s reluctant master, leading into a generous training segment, a fiendish betrayal, and the ultimate rise of two new Wing Chun masters.
Sammo Hung is both a master comedian and a damn fine martial artist, moving his body with remarkable agility for such a big guy, and consistently dominating the screen with his larger-than-life expression work. And beyond his physical skills, his talent for conceiving a well-rounded kung fu film might be even greater. Warriors Two starts off pretty farcically, but is soon roaring through dynamite action setpieces, while its training arc boasts the clearest explanation of martial arts fundamentals I’ve seen in any film. An expertly crafted five course meal of martial arts goodness.
We then shifted over to horror, checking out Ti West’s The Innkeepers. The recent release of West’s latest feature had me curious about his approach to horror, but unfortunately, The Innkeepers is by and large a dud. The film felt mostly like an excuse for West to jam in a lot of treacly young adult banter, like a version of Garden State trapped in a closing hotel’s lobby. The scares are predictable and infrequent, the characters seesaw between idiotic and obnoxious, and the cinematography fails to elevate the titular inn into anything other than a slightly seedy but otherwise mundane bed and breakfast place. West’s movies have gained some acclaim, and there were some glimmers of excellence in The Sacrament, but The Innkeepers has basically nothing to say for itself.
Having been thoroughly dazzled by the magnificent Sorcerer, we then checked out another William Friedkin film, To Live and Die in LA. The film stars William Petersen as Richard Chance, a secret service agent who’s determined to find a notorious counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe) after his partner is killed. Petersen embraces all manner of unscrupulous methods in pursuit of his play, echoing the callous ferocity of Gene Hackman in Friedkin’s prior French Connection. Propelled by both a desire for revenge and an irrepressible death drive, Petersen hunts Dafoe across the streets of LA, leaving a trail of senseless carnage in his wake.
Like all Friedkin films, To Live and Die in LA is an intensely, almost “aggressively” beautiful film. His combination of subject matter and shooting style feels inherently masculine; shots are wide and well-lit to convey maximum information, shadows are stark and infused with violent promise, and scenes of brutality are expressed bluntly and without apology. Through these choices, Friendkin drags the audience into the headspace of his furious, belligerent protagonists, only to tear the walls down upon them. Through doing so, he vividly illustrates masculinity’s self-destructive tendencies, making it easy to see why he’s one of the only tellers of such stories I actually enjoy. Petersen digs his own grave with dogged persistence through this film, and through Friedkin’s manipulation, his death comes off as more of a victory than that of his nemesis. Goddamn can Friedkin make a movie.
Our last feature of the week was a mid-century classic, the original Planet of the Apes. Having already seen both the Tim Burton remake and the more recent sequel to this film, I was frankly surprised to discover that Planet of the Apes is both smart and good, possessing far more thematic acuity than its pop culture footprint would suggest. Charlton Heston owns this film’s adventure sequences, and does a terrific job as his usual larger-than-life self; but personally, the portion of this film that most fascinated me was its ape-on-ape courtroom drama.
Once captured by ape society, it initially seems like Heston’s greatest challenge will be communicating his intelligence to them. With his neck grazed by a stray bullet, his vocal chords need time to recover, and thus the apes see him as no different from the other mute, untrainable humans. The reversal of roles here, and the tight parallels between ape society and our own scientific endeavors, make this segment an easy layup for any animal rights reading – but personally, I found it even more interesting how the ape scientists’ conjectures played off a rich secondary text of cultural assumptions, shining a light on how much of our own allegedly logical deductions rely on unconsidered magical thinking.
This contradiction between the allegedly neutral gaze of science and the inherently biased gaze of culture comes to a head when Heston’s intelligence is revealed. Rather than being celebrated or even just tolerated, he is immediately put on trial for his crime of existence. As a seemingly intelligent human, he contradicts the tenets of all their most holy scrolls – and as both the head of their scientific academy and their religious order, the celebrated Dr. Zaius has no choice but to condemn him. When the building blocks of your society and the reach of your brightest minds are at odds, those minds must be censured without pity.
Planet of the Apes manipulates our sympathies masterfully, drawing us fully alongside the bright young scientists and their dreams of truly understanding their history. Dr. Zaius’ perspective seems unconscionably cruel, a crime against the very pursuit of reason – until, at the end, we learn what he is saving his people from. Presented with irrefutable evidence that mankind once ruled his planet, Zaius admits that he always knew the truth. He has chosen to hobble the aspirations of his people because the alternative is destruction – the path of man, whose “brilliance walked hand in hand with his foolishness,” and who destroyed himself in his pursuit of glory.
I’ve traditionally been fairly skeptical of this “forbidden knowledge” trope, which posits that some knowledge is better off lost altogether. Having not grown up during the cold war, I lacked a healthy fear of nuclear apocalypse, and generally saw the pursuit of greater knowledge as an implicitly virtuous activity. But having watched the minds of multiple generations be turned into tapioca by both the internet and 24 hour TV news, I at this point possess great sympathy for Zaius’ position, and can’t say he’s in the wrong. The human mind is a fragile and inconstant thing, and it doesn’t take much force to push an entire culture or people into oblivion, drunk on false confidence and sick with propaganda. Humanity was not designed to survive our current information deluge, and I have grave doubts as to whether we actually will survive it; if sticking the internet in a cave and blowing up the cave would save us from ourselves, I’d happily press the plunger.
